Posts tagged ‘2011’

Congratulations to David M. Rubenstein! This patriotic philanthropist has donated $7.5 Million for the repair of our national symbol, the Washington Monument. Mr Rubenstein a self-described history buff has a long history himself in supporting American Institutions. In 2008, he was the man who purchased the Magna Carta (an early version) and he has put that Magna Carta on permanent loan to the National Archives. Besides being a history buff and philanthropist, he is a magna cum laude graduate of Duke University and the co-founder and Managing Director of The Carlyle Group.

As you may recall, the monument was damaged by the Aug. 23, 2011, 5.8-magnitude earthquake that shook the east coast of the USA. As a result, the monument is currently closed while it is being repaired.

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 8,300 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 3 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Two months ago Stanczyk produced an analysis of Genealogical Website rankings after reading the Eastmans Online Genealogy Network blog about one from Canada??. Since that time, I have been monitoring my own blog’s rankings every month to see how I have been progressing and I am very thankful for you, my good readers. But before we close out the 2011 year, I wanted to have a final Global Top 125 Genealogy Websites ranking. The current global rankings include a link to the prior ranking, so you can compare for yourself.

First off, let me say how I produced the survey. It is not like Family Tree Magazine’s Top 100 Genealogy Websites which “selects” their favorite 125 websites, by grabbing some from a variety of categories (African-American Genealogy, Jewish Genealogy, Big Genealogy Websites, etc.). Their breadth of “selections” is impressive and they range into reference websites too. Still every one of their selected websites is a valuable resource and the whole list could be used to form your own Genealogy Favorites (Bookmarks).

To arrive at my surveys, last survey and this current survey, I used Alexa.com as my source for rankings. I gathered websites from all over the world and I used the GLOBAL RANKING. This is why we, in the USA may have some disagreements, as Alexa.com also keeps a ranking within the local country. The American rankings for the USA websites tend to be much higher than the foreign regions for us. Likewise, in Canada or the UK, their local genealogy websites tend to rank higher than USA websites because they tend to use their local resources. But in the USA everyone is from somewhere else, so we use USA websites and genealogy websites from around the entire Globe to do our research. Finally, since I use Alexa.com for the rankings, I have to accept that they may not have considered a website that might actually be about genealogy as being about something else, because the website did not specify or because they described their website as something else. Also Alexa.com does a very poor job of ranking websites outside the USA/Canada/UK unless they write in English. To compensate (modestly), I did add in two Polish genealogical websites and included their global rankings in the survey. After all, this is a blog about Polish Genealogy and other musings. I also added in a few odds & ends, such the the US National Archives (even though not all of the site is not genealogically related — Alexa does not allow for me to select a sub-site within Archive.gov).

Findings

The new websites, seem to be the ones I added. Some of the older websites no longer had data, so we see some with a ranking of: 99,999,999. This is not an accurate ranking but it must be well beyond 30Million and may now be in the 100Million range and as such, Alexa.com now ignores it or at least does not keep its data.

Many of the top 50 Genealogy websites moved up and moved upwards a good bit. A very few of the Top 50 moved down slightly. So overall, it seems that Genealogy is becoming more popular (than all other websites in general). To give you some feel, this blog that you are reading right now, moved upwards some 6Million places. However, it only moved up four places on the Global Top 125 Genealogy Websites ranking.

In the Top 10, there was very little movement. Most notable, was Fold3.com (formerly Footnote.com), the recent Ancestry.com acquisition moved to number 9 (up from #10) and Eastmans Online Genealogy Network moved up to #10 (from 17). The Top 10 also has one of the new websites (NARA) and MyHeritage.com (#2 — one of those websites that Alexa.com had not counted as a genealogy website, but which we included this time).

Next Year

I will begin dropping website that are ranked at or above 20Million to allow room for some new websites and to keep the list to 125. Please send me an email about any website that I should investigate for inclusion.

I will publish the future Rankings on or about the 1st of: March, June, September, and December going forward.

Stanczyk just read EOGN (Eastman Online Genealogy Network) and could not believe what he read. So I followed the source and read that and still did not believe. So I checked further – because I could NOT locate the benchmark/methodology of the survey which is NOT credible. I then Googled and found this source here: http://www.progenealogists.com/top50genealogy2011.htm . I certainly would agree with these rankings as these are what I use most often throughout the year.

Ancestry.com$ – Ancestry.com is the leading genealogical data site, and includes articles, instruction, and reference help.

MyHeritage.com – Focuses on genealogy community building and networking.

FindAGrave.com – This database of 57 million cemetery inscriptions adds about a million per month and often includes tombstone photos.

FamilySearch.org – This major data website sponsored by the LDS Church includes the IGI, census records, the library’s catalog and a growing collection of historical records from throughout the world, along with instruction and reference help. (4>5>5)

Genealogy.com$ – A major data site, includes family trees, instruction and reference help. (5>2>4)

Geni.com – Free, with the world’s largest collaborative family. (31>8>18)

FamilyTiez.com– (New) A site where families can establish their own pages to share news, photos, events and genealogy with each other. (30>not ranked)

Send Me your top 10 Polish Genealogy Websites. This will be a non-scientific survey and I will only publish my findings if I can get 36 emails and I will add in my own top 10 Polish Genealogy sites too. Do not include from the above “generic” genealogy sites. I will allow only Polish (or German, Russian, Austrian, Slavic, Czech, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Jewish, or Hungarian genealogy websites that have ties to Poland).